has enriched our culture with the appreciation of pattern and interaction in music, art and drama, but we are sometimes too good at pattern recognition, and this is the basis of superstition and the follies of speculation. People, singly and en masse, see patterns in random events and gamble on the predicted outcome. In terms of group hysteria, these patterns can become self-fulfilling, as when everyone believes in the New Economy and it inflates as a result. But chance holds sway, and eventually these patterns are revealed for the illusion that they are. The bubble bursts or the gambler’s ‘run of luck’ collapses. We emerge bruised and not much the wiser.
That makes sense, doesn’t it? We’re too good at seeing patterns so, instead of encouraging and developing this skill we need to restrain and discipline it using our rational faculties. Register a hunch, maybe, but never act upon it before it has been critically analysed and tested against reality.
I don’t agree.
What is this talk of being ‘too good’ at something? Millions of years of evolution have led us to where we are, and I respect that fact. If we have exceptional talents as a result, then I believe we must learn to develop and work better with those talents rather than subjugate them to other abilities. When people get their science wrong, my answer is that they should improve their science, not reject it. By the same token, when we get our magic wrong, I believe we should improve our magic, not abandon it.
This book is intended to improve our magic as best it can. So it will be encouraging us to take a closer look at pattern recognition. Consider this example.
I take a stone, and I release it. It falls to the earth, every time I do it, in a quite predictable pattern.
The same happens with an apple.
I take a live butterfly and release it. The subsequent motion is very hard to predict or explain, but I recognise that it will, almost invariably, flap about for a while.
I take a bird and release it. At first the results seem as chaotic as the butterfly’s, but then I discover patterns of interaction. Under certain circumstances (as with homing pigeons) the bird will fly toward me. More typically it will flee away in fear. And so on.
I take my wife and release her. An even wilder universe of possible results emerges, and yet my supreme pattern recognition skills begin slowly to map that territory: there is coming toward me in love, or coming toward me in anger; there is indifference, laughter, torrents of abuse... and there are multiple layers of conscious or unconscious simulations of such reactions in order to make a point or express something which may arise from any region of her soul or the interactions between us.
Four years of marriage and, although I still pay more attention to my wife than to any bird, butterfly or stone, there remains so much to explore. For I do believe that our fellow human beings form the most complex patterns of all.
I quote above what I was taught in my formative years, about mankind’s steady rise to the mastery of science. It went with a belief in our defining trait as: “Man—the toolmaker”. The idea being that we alone learnt to make and master tools and this lead to every evolutionary advantage including enormous brain development. However, as the above example illustrates, no tool can be as complex as another human being. No mechanical process can match the perversity of an individual or group of people.
I therefore propose that it was not tool-making, so much as social interaction that went with the evolution of our larger brains. (And I note the recent discovery3 that certain crows have been shown to possess remarkable tool-manipulation skills to confirm that tool-making is not so closely linked to brain size as was taught.)
You see it in a growing baby: picking things up and releasing them over and over. Smiling and observing the world smiling back. At some point nearly every child makes the vital leap and recognises that certain patterns of reaction are so complex that they can only be accommodated by projecting some of its own conscious awareness out into the pattern—in other words, by assuming that other people too are conscious, intelligent beings. “Mama must be a person—just like me!”
This is the very assumption that is helping me to map the territory of wild and wifely behaviour patterns. It would also help me to model the bird’s behaviour to some degree.
This book argues that there is no more powerful technique for handling our environment. This is far from being a reversion to primitive and outmoded behaviour. Look for conscious intelligence in phenomena and you awaken the greatest powers of the human brain to assist your exploration or mastery. Whereas those who insist on hording “conscious will” inside themselves, and seeing only mechanical processes outside themselves, are closing down most of their brain connections.
This is the true “dumbing down”—a simplification of thinking that does indeed give sharper focus but offers little greater advantage. Like abandoning the fork for a knife—it cuts better but the peas of wisdom roll off and you risk cutting your tongue within the mashed potato of success.
Superstition thrives on absolutes, not relatives. Religion and science teach us to look for absolutes and so we lose trust in what is relative. Magic teaches us to walk on the shifting sands of relative or workable truth and that is a great skill. Without that skill we can only kid ourselves that truths must be absolute. Superstition is not the result of magic, but rather the result of people wandering into magical territory armed only with the tools of religion and science.
That is why our culture has become so deeply superstitious and why I refuse to cloak my ideas in pseudo scientific or religious terminology—even though it would improve my status among the gullible.
So... a slight adjustment to the phrasing of the opening paragraph of the previous section:
Aren’t we turning our back on outmoded superstition when we talk of demons instead of falling back on clumsy scientific jargon and psychobabble to describe what are, after all, the exquisite complexities of human experience?
WE ARE ENSNARED IN AN EVIL WEB OF DARK FORCES
Baby pushes Spoon to edge of Table and... over it goes. Spoon hits the floor with a satisfying tinkle, leaving a charming little splash of white and gold— milk and cereal—to relieve the monotonous pattern of the dining room carpet. Baby gurgles with joy.
Baby is discovering the delightful mastery that Will exercises over the environment. It’s the tenth time spoon has hit the floor with unfailing obedience during this meal—not that Baby knows anything yet about the number ten nor of its intimations of Pythagorean perfection and cabalistic or even ordinal significance.
Spoon never lets Baby down. Not like Mama. Sure enough, Mama is now bending down to retrieve Spoon, and will put it back in the dish with one of those delightful little sighs but—uh oh—she has stopped to rinse it under the tap this time, and stands arms akimbo scowling for a few seconds before returning Spoon to its launching pad.
Mama is a problem to Baby. She is clearly controllable—like everything else—but seems to malfunction at times. It’s a tiresome responsibility for Baby, who has so much work to do without the added burden of learning to operate a defective Mama.
Baby is forced to sacrifice vital learning/growing time and energy to the contemplation of this problem—and Baby eventually comes up with a stunning, mind-blowing solution. Is it possible that Mama might contain a Me inside her? Until now it has been obvious that there is only one Me in the world, and that is Baby; but if Mama is being operated internally by an invisible Me—a Me that can be feeling happy one minute, bored or angry another— then it might explain her erratic responses.
Baby begins
